The surprising way smartphones are changing the way we shop

The app that links to shopping on Amazon.com on the Amazon Fire Phone, in Seattle.

The app that links to shopping on Amazon.com on the Amazon Fire Phone, in Seattle.

Photo: Ted S. Warren — The Associated Press

Photo: Ted S. Warren — The Associated Press

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The app that links to shopping on Amazon.com on the Amazon Fire Phone, in Seattle.

The app that links to shopping on Amazon.com on the Amazon Fire Phone, in Seattle.

Photo: Ted S. Warren — The Associated Press

The surprising way smartphones are changing the way we shop

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Gamestop has no doubt that mobile devices have changed the way its customers shop. Smartphones and tablets now account for up to 68 percent of the traffic to the videogame chain’s website, where customers are frequently browsing products and looking up trade-in values for their old games.

One thing they’re not doing much of on mobile devices? Buying stuff.

In fact, “purchasing through that phone probably wouldn’t even make the top ten list of engagement activities that they do,” said Jason Allen, the retailer’s vice president of multichannel.

Gamestop’s experience reflects a trend seen throughout the industry: While there has been a surge in traffic to retailers’ websites from smartphones, a proportionately big boom in sales on these gadgets has yet to appear. In other words, for all the time we spend swiping and tapping on our phones, we still aren’t especially willing to make purchases on them.

Instead, shoppers are largely using their phones as something of a personal, pocket-sized sales associate that helps them browse and research while they are in a store. That has prompted retailers to adapt their mobile strategies to help them do something counterintuitive: Boost in-store sales.

“We’re not overly focused on conversion on mobile, we really see it as a tool to drive traffic in our stores,” said Krista Berry, chief digital officer of department store chain Kohl’s. Conversion is an industry term for when browsers become buyers.

At Kohl’s, executives say they have spent the last year and a half updating their app, in part to accommodate an in-store shopper who is more frequently searching for product reviews, watching video content about merchandise and sharing their finds on social media. When customers are in Kohl’s stores and on the retailer’s Wifi network, customers spend more time on the app than when they’re not in the store, company officials said.

These behaviors have led Kohl’s to develop a new “in-store mode” for its app, in which users who walk into a Kohl’s store will be asked if they want to use a special version that is tailored for wandering the store. Kohl’s declined to say how the in-store mode will be different from its regular app experience, but said it would be available in September.

Big-box behemoth Target is also catering to shoppers who are using their phone to guide them through stores with a relaunched app that has a stronger emphasis on a tool that helps them building their weekly shopping list and an interactive map of each store in its fleet.

It’s easy to see why the company has moved in this direction: Since it installed free WiFi in its stores a few years ago, Target has found that the most-visited site, by far, is the retailer’s own website.

This enthusiastic embrace of in-store phone use might have seemed unthinkable in corners of the retail industry only a few years ago, when many brick-and-mortar chains were panicking about showrooming, the industry term for when shoppers would go to a store to check out merchandise, only to ultimately buy it online for a better price. But that fear has largely dissipated as study after study has shown showrooming is not a huge threat. In fact, several studies have found that the opposite behavior — browsing online before buying in a physical store — is more common.

Even as companies bend to the reality that shoppers, for now, are not buying many things on their phones, they haven’t given up on finding ways to make a small-screen sale. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Pinterest are all experimenting with their own version of a “buy button,” a one-click way for users to make a purchase without leaving their app or having to go through the cumbersome process of entering credit card numbers on other personal information.